26 LEARNING ABOUT THE BRAIN

Already in ancient times, the search for a substrate - the carrier of the psyche. The Pythagoreans believed that the soul is located in the brain. Hippocrates ranked only the carnal phenomena of the soul to the heart, and considered the brain an organ of the mind. Just like Nemesius, who placed the function of perception in the frontal ventricle of the brain, thinking in the middle, and memory in the back, Magnus attributed the mental faculties of the soul to the front in the Middle Ages, and memory to the posterior ventricle of the brain. In the New Age there is a tendency to rank all psychic abilities not to various parts of the brain, but only to one of them. It is known that R. Descartes placed the soul in the epiphysis, and other scientists - in the white matter of the brain or in its corpus callosum. In the XVIII – XIX centuries. F. Gal-la's phrenological system receives special prominence, according to which each psychological ability corresponds to a certain part of the brain. There was a so-called "brain map". Error F. Gall was that he sought to automatically impose a system of mental abilities on the morphological structure of the brain. J.Flurance, with the help of a number of experiments, confirmed that put forward in the XV1I1 century. A. Haller's hypothesis that the brain is not a set of independent organs, but a single, homogeneous whole, which does not have a clearly defined specialization. In 1861, P. Brock, on the basis of clinical observations, discovered a speech center in the brain. This discovery was the starting point for Brock that each of the mental functions has a strictly limited place in the brain. As proof of such a conclusion, shortly after the discovery of P. Brock, “centers of visual memory” (A. Bastian, 1869), “centers of writing” (Z. Exner, 1861), and “centers of concepts” ( J. Shar-ko, 1887) and others. Thanks to A. Fritsch and K. Hitzig's experimental studies in 1870, it was possible to determine the presence in the cortex of the motor centers.

T. Meinert (1867) substantiated that the cortical layer of the brain consists of a large number of cells, each of which is the carrier of its own mental function.

It was possible to cope with such errors only after the works of Russian scientists I. M. Sechenov, V. M. Bekhterev and I. P. Pavlov, by which it was proved that the brain is an organ of the psyche. In the middle of the XX century. brain surgery was performed.

Attention was paid to the question of the functional asymmetry of the hemispheres of the human brain, the insufficiency of morphological data and the need for their addition, in particular with psychological analysis, were comprehended (R. Sherry, S. Springer, G. Deich). Analyzes prove that both hemispheres make an important contribution to the organization of behavior, but each hemisphere implements specialized functions.